Best Social Media Automation Tools
Best Social Media Automation Tools
So what are the kind of top five social media tools that I use? It’s something a lot of people ask me what I’m doing with social media. Who I outsource it to and stuff like that. And I’ve obviously got people who see something’s not right here, this, that and the next thing. So one, social media is a hard thing to do and keeping top off and consistently put out enough information to make people want to follow you and you know that’s a hard thing to do. So keeping on top of, I think the only… For me, I don’t outsource it. I use a lot of different tools which I’m going to go through in a moment. And the reason I use those tools is that I was doing it all manually and it was a lot of grunt work and I like automation and where possible, I’m always happy to use automation.
LinkedHelper for Linkedin Automation
So the first tool that I use for social media is Linked Helper. So you go to linkedhelper.com and it’s a great tool that allows you to automate a lot of the kind of tedious tasks on LinkedIn. Now it only works for LinkedIn and some of those tedious tasks would be endorsing folk, sending a message out to your recently added connections, viewing people’s profiles and things like that. You know, there’s a lot of different things it can do. It can also remove people based on certain search terms.
You can also add people based on certain search terms. There’s a whole lot of automation out there that allows your LinkedIn profile to be viewed by, a lot of people. Now there’s no special button you push and comes all these followers or whatnot. I think with any social media platform you always have to make sure that you’re posting good engaging content if you want to build that audience.
But Linked Helper certainly does a lot of the grunt work on LinkedIn and works very well and something I’ve used for a number of years now. There was previously a, I think it was called Autopilot for LinkedIn and I think LinkedIn actually got hold of the game, made them shut it down. And there have been some other ones over the years as well and they all do a great job, on automating a lot of that kind of grunt work, which then frees up a lot of time for you to then be able to make videos or post engaging content. So there’s no real excuse on LinkedIn if you’re using Linked Helper.
Personally, I use a virtual computer to run Linked Helper so that it runs 24/7 and I just go and update the sentence. Now I do have a full tutorial on Linked Helper which you can click on the link here and it will show you how it all works and everything that you can do on Linked Helper at present. So make sure you have a look at that. So that’s my number one tool.
Sprout Social for Social Media Scheduling
Second tool would be Sprout Social. Now that’s just a personal preference. I mean, and I’ll tell you why it’s a personal preference. First of all, now there are very similar tools like Hootsuite, ContentCal and many other social media scheduling tools that will allow you to kind of set your thing, you know your posts up for the next week on a Sunday night, for example.
So if you’re sitting on a Sunday night, 7:00, bored, there’s nothing on telly, then you can schedule all your social media posts for that week using one of these tools. Now what I like about Sprout Social if, for example, I’ve done a great talk at say, SearchNorwich, which I have been to in the past, great meet up and I want to repost that video to let other people see it.
Now what I can do with Sprout Social that I can’t do with the likes of Hootsuite is I can schedule that to go out on say the 15th of July at 2:40 PM and what I can then do is continually add in another date. So it could be on the 15th of July, the 27th of July, the 4th of August, the 24th of August. And I can schedule the same post multiple times without having to go in and copy and paste the actual content of that post. So that is a great little feature that I love about Sprout Social and that’s why that is the number two tool that I recommend that you use.
As I say, it’s down to personal preference. There are others like ContentCal and Hootsuite and all the other ones that are out there that can work very well for you. And so that just takes up or frees up a bit more time through the week so you’re not actively setting a post then everything you want to post something. So I think that’s quite a cool feature.
Jarvee/Massplanner for Building a Social Following on Autopilot
Number three would be jarvee.com, previously known as MassPlanner. Now, this tool works across LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and various other social media platforms. Now what this allows you to do, and I’m going to mention Twitter as the example here.
So if I want to set up Jarvee on my Twitter account, I could make sure that my Twitter account follows everyone who follows the likes of OnCrawl, DeepCrawl and all these kind of big ACU software tool providers and now what happens there is when this tool follows people, people will start to follow you back. If they don’t follow you back, part of the settings of the tool is, if they don’t follow you back within a certain time period, the tool will automatically unfollow them.
So it’s a great way to build your audience up. And again, something you can do manually, but it’s a lot of tedious, hard work. So I think in terms of a social media and audience building, these, or jarvee.com is a great tool to use and as long as you play within the limits of the tool, then you’re not really going to get any kind of impact. And it’s something that can work for you 24/7, 365 days a year.
And I think you’d be very quickly surprised at how quickly you can build a really good following. And the alternative to doing that is, you know, buying fake followers, which is never going to work well for you. You’re not going to get engagement from fake people. So jarvee.com has a lot of value to be added and again, I’ve got a full tutorial on how that works and which I’ll put a link to. So that is tool number three in terms of my top five social media tools.
FollowLike for Engagement
The fourth tool that I would use would be followlike.net. Now I think out there, there’s a lot of people doing social media and they are creating engagement or it’s not necessarily the right engagement. You know, they’re not getting the engagement you and I perceive them to have or especially if you’re starting out and you don’t have a huge following, again, you’re not going to get great engagement.
So FollowLike is basically one of that kind of tool where there are crowds of people on there where you pay a subscription and you can put your tweets out there, your Facebook posts, and whatever else and it will get engagement. Liked retweets and things like that. And for me, I think you’ve got to… If something looks viral, you know it’s got more of a chance of going viral.
So that is quite a cool little tool that kind of allows you to give the perception to the audience that things are engaging and then naturally you can start to then get some engagement through that as well as your audience grows and whatnot. So it’s a great little tool if you want to give out the perception that that you’re getting a lot of engagement there. So I think that’s quite a great tool and cost effective.
Canva for Social Media Graphics
And the fifth tool, now I’ve mentioned tools of how to create audiences, how to automate certain things. One thing I’m really bad at as the graphics side of things, and you have tools like Canva and stuff like that, which are templates that I can drop builders and stuff like that, that can allow you to create really good engaging graphics and stuff like that.
So I think using tools like Canva and there are a few others, very similar, out there that will allow you to create the perception that you’re good at graphics when you’re really not.
And I think that is something that you really need to get a grasp on as well is nice visuals or whatever it may be to help encourage engagement and stuff like that. So that is another great tool for social media. There are loads of other social media tools out there.
That is the top five. I don’t think you need to have every tool out there. I think your scheduling, doing a bit of the grunt work in terms of building a following and potentially sticking a graphic up are the key areas that a lot of people fall down on when it comes to social media marketing. So hopefully these tools do give you a little bit of help when you are trying to build up a good social media audience.
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Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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